The Practice of Therapy

Gordon Brewer: Well, hello everyone. And welcome again to the podcast. And so I'm happy to, for you to get to know today, Donny Frank and Donny joins us, joins me rather from New York and Donny, hello and welcome. So as I like to start with everyone, tell folks a little bit more about yourself and how you've landed where you've landed.
Donny Frank: I've been a. Marriage and family therapist now for close to 30 years. My gray hairs are starting to show the you know, my journey is not complicated in terms of how I got here. I grew up in a very very family oriented family, both in terms of nuclear family and the extended family.
And so It was always of value for me. It didn't mean that I was going to do anything professionally about it. That was not my intention. I think I wanted to be a lawyer at one point, probably my most serious alternative career, but there were other things along the way. But at some point in time, I kind of bumped into the opportunity to take my advanced schooling, and I thought about it, and it was the opportunity to go into the world of therapy, and I, to be honest with you, I was not really interested in being a therapist.
I like people. I like helping people. That wasn't the modality, should you say, you know, that was going to be looking to help people with, but I did get intrigued by the idea of family therapy and marriage therapy and specifically not from New York. So in New York, back when I went into the field, there was no you know, marriage therapy wasn't a licensed field.
If you just. Hung up a shingle or had announced yourself as being a marriage therapist that's how you did business. So it wasn't really like I said, a licensed track yet, but the idea of being able to work with couples. And strength and families was very attractive for me. And so I explored it, went for it, and here I am 30 years later.
Gordon Brewer: Yes, well, that's great, great. And have you been in, are you, do you currently have a practice or doing private practice? Yes,
Donny Frank: yes, I am doing private practice. I worked in my first stages of my career. I was the director of a mental health clinic in the northern New Jersey area.
Gordon Brewer: Back up here on
Donny Frank: the East Coast.
Gordon Brewer: Mm-Hmm. .
Donny Frank: But I was, you know, after a couple of years of starting out in the, in the administrative side of things. And then I started my own private practice and eventually that's what took me full time. And I left the agency work. I said I've been doing that ever since really, I mean, close to three years now.
Gordon Brewer: Yeah. Yeah. And so, so do you primarily just work with couples or do you work with individuals as well?
Donny Frank: I would say primarily couples and I'm a marriage and family therapist.
We are living in a time where certain disturbing trends are becoming more than the exception alienations fractured families. And so my work has taken on a whole new level of meaning
Families overall and, and specifically couples. But I would say almost all the work that I do is Relationship oriented.
I've gotten involved in the singles community over the last 10 years or so and I've done a lot of work with helping people. That's kind of the channel that came about because you know, I would say about a little more than 10 years ago, I just realized, you know, I'm seeing, we're seeing the challenges that go on after, after marriage.
And I started to get more curious about what would singles need to know. In order to be able to avoid some of the problems that go on on the other side once they can make the commitments.
Gordon Brewer: And
Donny Frank: that's how I got myself involved in Singles Community, and I hope today that I'm able to provide singles some direction as to how to go about seeking the right mates, making the right decisions,
Gordon Brewer: so
Donny Frank: that it doesn't mean there's not going to be any challenges.
We'll talk about that when we get to the book. No, it doesn't mean that you're going to marry a fail safe marriage, you know, where there'll be no challenges. It's. It means that you'll be best prepared to handle the challenges with the person that you choose to marry. That's kind of how we go with that.
Yeah, yeah. So I'm curious as you've been working with singles and, and that community, what are kind of the common themes that you see come up that you, you notice that people struggle with once they get married?
Donny Frank: Oh my, okay, that's a, that's a very good question and kind of the question we always get asked, like, what do you say is the one thing that companies struggle with, you know?
And I'm sure there's never just one, there's not just one thing, obviously. Exactly,
Donny Frank: and, and, and it also changes based upon, you know, I guess my workload of the month or whatever, then it kind of shifts. I just, I mean, if I'm going to say it straight, I think that before a disturbing trend in families of alienations, in fact, fractured families.
I also believe that we have to be paying attention to the overemphasis on self. And I just see, I, anyway, it's a little bit scary, you know, in the course of. The third is my work, how rapidly we've been moving more and more towards a focus on self actualization, self fulfillment, self everything.
And it was a topic to talk about in the early days, but now it's really making an impact on marriages. Because where I come from and the values that I understand marriages to be built upon is where the focus is not on getting our needs met as much as it is on how we meet the needs of the other.
Giving is what builds healthy relationships, and there's a lot of self focus.
Gordon Brewer: And
Donny Frank: it shows in various ways. I mean, it's not one way that it shows up, but if you trace it down to it, are we other oriented or are we self oriented? What's our way of doing relationships?
Gordon Brewer: I'm also a marriage and family therapist and I'll, you know, do a lot of couples work.
And I know one of the things that I find myself saying to couples a lot of times particularly, you know, maybe younger couples that are just new and into, you know, into the whole marriage thing is just really this idea that, you know, part of getting married and part of having a healthy relationship is that you do have to, you do have to be willing to give up parts of yourself for the sake of the relationship.
And that there's, that there's, you know, and I couldn't agree with you more that there's just the, the whole emphasis on the individual and how, you know, individual rights and what is fair for me and getting my needs met and all of those kinds of things has been just so much a part of our culture. Just over the years and it's just I, I think for, for, for, to some degree it's uniquely American as well.
I, I don't know that for sure, but that would be my guess in that we're just kind of set up that way. And so, yeah.
Donny Frank: I'll give you an example of like of of how I believe the focus on self has distorted, I mean good important concepts, but where they've gone kind of like over outta control. So the, the, the idea of self-care.
I think that's universally understood to be an important thing, self care, even those of us that are oriented or like to live our lives that are, you know, other oriented and giving, but here's how I see it. And maybe sound radical to young people and, you know, but self care in my mind is like the rest stop in life.
My journey in life, my primary responsibility as I see it is to make the world a better place. And I start with people I care most about. The people who are in my inner orbit. You know, my spouse, my kids, my parents, my siblings, you know, I start there and I build out. That's my, that's my agenda of life. But you know, I mean, we have limitations.
And it's hard to stay on the road, keep on driving, and not refill the tank, and not change the tires. So we have pit stops, we have rest stops. That's what I see self care as being. It's in service of getting back on the road to become the giver once again.
Gordon Brewer: Right. But
Donny Frank: I found that it only but in some In some cases, self care became the goal, it became the journey.
And it's almost like you lose yourself in the pit stop, and the race is going on, and you haven't gotten out of the pit stop. We don't make our home in self care, it's a means towards getting back in the work of being a giver. And that seems, to me, it always seemed to be an obvious thing. Seems today that it's a little bit more radical than I thought.
Gordon Brewer: Right, right. It's not
Donny Frank: the goal, it's to facilitate the goal.
Right,
Donny Frank: right.
Yeah, I mean, if it, if, if things are too individually focused, it automatically sets up a dynamic of competition.
Gordon Brewer: And, yeah,
and so in, in relationships, as we know, it's just that to compete with each other might, you might could do that a little bit on the fun level, but in.
At the core level, that's just not going to be sustainable.
Donny Frank: Not looking for connection and for a meaningful relationship. It doesn't, it doesn't get generated by competition. That's for sure. I agree with you. Right. Yeah.
Gordon Brewer: Yeah. So I'm curious for, for you, Donny, what what do you see as kind of the components of healthy relationships?
Donny Frank: Well well, assuming again that we're where we established that giving is where we, where love is is
Gordon Brewer: kind of
Donny Frank: built and maintained. But there's a, there's a dynamic, I think, towards to giving what does it mean to give? What context does it happen? So I think one of the most important skills to set up a giving relationship is the ability to make room for an other.
It goes back to what we're saying now, the challenge is if it's about me, then there's a room for someone else's thoughts and feelings indeed. We have to kind of figure out a way that whenever we interact, whenever we, it's not just the people, by the way, I'll give you an example of a nine. It's a personal way of doing this, but we empty ourselves out.
We allow people to have room for their thoughts and their feelings, and then we become responsive to that other that we've allotted to our lives. Giving space is, is, is huge. They say that love is, love is, you know, the, the, the most direct effective way of giving love is by listening. Good listener is, is listening.
show that they care about the person who's speaking. They want to hear, they want to take them in. They want to kind of like embrace them. And there's no embrace like, like him listening, but listening means I make room for you. It's easy to listen to somebody when they complain about somebody else. Easy to listen to somebody when they talk about an exciting trip that they had.
It's more challenging when they share something with us that has to do with us or an opinion that we disagree with. Giving them space to be able to do that and hear it and understand it, validate, that's not easy.
Gordon Brewer: Yeah.
Donny Frank: So I say the skill of making room for others is huge and so that'd be one. I think that another quality that is critical for healthy relationships is, and I say this to the people who are dating, say, The stuff's going to show up.
Don't try to, like I said before, don't try to find the perfect person that you are going to, they'll be so contoured to you and your stuff that nothing, no challenges will happen. Ridiculous. Everyone knows that. So you say the challenges will show up. Look for somebody who, when the challenges do show up, will roll up their sleeves and do the work.
It's such an important quality because anything good is going to have to happen through building. Nothing's going to just go, you're not going to close through a relationship and have good things from it.
Gordon Brewer: And
Donny Frank: that's, that's big, especially again, resilient. Sometimes they say is on the low today, you know, another aspect of some of our social challenges, societal challenges, I should say.
And resilience. When I see a challenge, I face it. I deal with it. We work it out. Yeah, give me more if you want those are two that come to mind.
Yeah. Yeah. You know, you know, I think in, in my work with couples, I, you know, of course I do a lot of I draw a lot on the work of the Gottman's. And but what they have done, and I think one of the ways I like to sum up with a couple, what is the sign of a healthy relationship is when two people can share their internal world with the other and know that it's going to be treated with kindness and compassion.
As opposed with disdain or, or being repulsed. Yeah.
Donny Frank: Yeah. And that's, and that's the degree to which we can make room. And I always say like, I'll last up to a couple. It's like, how much room can you make for your spouse? How much room can you make? What do you mean by that? How much can they say until you shut them out?
And say, that's it. Okay, done. You know, what was that? I can't say anything more.
Gordon Brewer: Yeah.
Donny Frank: Let more in, let more in. Let the challenge get more challenging, more uncomfortable, but let them have that space. Every time you give more room. And it doesn't mean it's at the expense of you, you will, you, you are store intact, but every other, other layers of space you give to somebody, the demonstration of commitment and love.
That's how, that's kind of how I see it also. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. That's it. I think that's so true. I think I love that, that way of thinking about it. Well, to change gears a little bit, Donny, I know one of the things is you've written some written a book. To help couples say, tell us about all of that.
Donny Frank: Okay, good. I mean, I love to write happens to be I do a lot of writing. This book I marriage is really a, it's a culmination so far of my career. It's not, it's not the end, but it's a culmination of what I've, ive I've done so far. And it's, it's that's where the, the book is called The, the Making of a Dynamic Duo.
Gordon Brewer: Mm-Hmm. .
Donny Frank: And I, I, I tried to. Write a book that hits certain targets. And I'm gonna tell you what they are. Number one, it's it's a very, it's it's very readable. I, maybe I'm projecting a little bit, cause I know when I read some of the books that are out there on the market, I must say this is a better book than anybody else's, I'm just saying it's just my own personal style.
I I sometimes feel like if this could be said in three pages, why am I reading 30 pages? So that's a little bit how I operate in general. I don't think there's a chapter in this book that's more than three pages.
Gordon Brewer: But
Donny Frank: I do believe I could have written 30 pages instead of the three. It takes more time to write three than 30.
So it's very concise. It, it makes it, therefore, the kind of a book that couples can actually read together. Let's read three pages a week. But it's not just that it's a shorter chapter and a readable but I was, it was also important to me that no chapter gets written unless there is a very clear concept and or, and usually together and skill where they can execute that concept.
And so the book potentially has it every three pages, another intervention that can actually transform a relationship. That's the other part of it. And and so that, that's where I put a lot of effort into. I, I appreciate creativity. Every chapter comes along with a drawing that will basically you know, we have a couple of the dynamic duo that shows up in every chapter.
Whatever, this is just an example, but they, this couple shows up in every chapter and you follow their journey through the concepts and the, and the interventions. And I kind of got you know, connected to these guys, you know, I created them, but I still connected to this dynamic duo. They have no names, but dynamic you know, spouse one, spouse two.
But and, And this, what I was also intentional about you know, I, I have my trainings. I was first and foremost, an amalga therapist, which I, and we talked about that, but at the core of my work is very dialog, dialogic, which is in the amalga way. But I had been trained by, by Gottman and EFT and I have all the trainings, I think that are pretty much at the core of my work.
You know, at the, at the top of marital marital therapy interventions. But I didn't want to put anything scientific in the book either. I want it to be a lay person that you read it. They don't get bogged down. You don't need to have a thesaurus or some other app open up in other a window opened up to translate terms.
Very straightforward, very readable and, and filled with metaphors. Every chapter has got a metaphor of life to show. And this is an important overriding principle of the book, which is, as I say, the introduction. Most of the metaphors, in fact, maybe all the metaphors, not all, but most of the metaphors in the book are from things that are unrelated to marriage at all.
And something happened there and you know, a couple of stories about pet fish that we used to raise and we had a couple of mishaps with it. But each one at some point made me think about marriage and how that could inform couples to be better. And what I wanted to get across with that is that. If something's important to you, like a marriage, you're not going to just learn about marriage when you read a book on marriage, you're going to, you're going to be, you're always going to be thinking about how does that experience I just had going to help me in my marriage.
And if I was, if money was the most important thing in my life, I'd do the same thing with money. I'd say something just happened now. How is that going to translate into my making myself, my business, a better business? Whatever's important to us, that's the lens that we see the world through. And I do think that marriage is important enough and society desperately needs to protect families.
And it's worth seeing the world through the lenses of relationships and learn everything you can. Anybody, anywhere. What does it tell me about my marriage? How can I make it better? And that's really, to me, that was a really big piece to run through the entire book.
Gordon Brewer: Right.
Donny Frank: I have some of the ideas that yeah.
Yeah. Well, I totally agree with you. I think the relationships, I mean, everything we do in life is in the context of a relationship of some sort. And yeah. And I think being able to, being able to navigate that, not only in marriage relationships, but just in interacting with people day in and day out, I think we need those are skills that everybody is desperately in need of.
Donny Frank: Yeah. Definitely. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say one more thing about the book, just to say another aspect of the book that also runs through is that it's very realistic, like there's ups and downs and we don't, we're not afraid to describe a healthy, functioning, dynamic relationship that has its ups and downs.
So the cover basically is my favorite part of the book. I'm not talking about it from a graphic point of view necessarily,
Gordon Brewer: but the
Donny Frank: message of this cover is what the book's all about.
Gordon Brewer: When
Donny Frank: we measure a relationship, it's almost like we measure a portfolio, a financial portfolio. It's the trend. This couple is trending up.
They're going to be, they're going to be times they're going to have ruptures. Good couples will rupture. They're going to have their moments. But when you want to evaluate, is this couple a healthy dynamic couple? You can look at the trends overall, they fall, but their drops like a good financial investment, The drops will happen less frequently.
with less intensity and a shorter duration.
Gordon Brewer: They
Donny Frank: know how to get back. They know how to get the arrow back up. You know, they might have one day, the market's bad for one day. They get it back up. They know how to deepen their relationship, go higher and higher. And next time they fall, they fall from a higher place.
But when you look at them, it's like, we're trending up. This book is intended to help couples, the upward trenders. And if you're an upward trender, they're going to couple say, when do we finish therapy? When we're not going to fight anymore, are you kidding? That's when you're going to be dead. Yeah, yeah, right.
As long as you're two people in a relationship, dynamic, they're both showing up to the relationship, you're clash, you're a lot of clashes. But we're upwards fenders. We never hit the canvas, especially here, we don't hit the canvas, like a boxer falls and out for the count. Couples hit the canvas, they can't get up again, you know, we don't hit the canvas anymore.
We fall, we don't, we don't hit the canvas. So that's really, it's upward trenders is what dynamic couples are.
Gordon Brewer: In, in the little bit of time we have left, Donny, what, what do you see are I'm curious your perspective on this. What do you see as kind of the essential skills a couple needs to have in order to maintain that upward trend?
Donny Frank: They had need the skill of perspective taking be able to know your spouse is not here's the basic threshold if a couple's okay I say I want to make sure they realize that you think your spouse is trying to hurt you You know, there's a double the two parts of the same question.
Gordon Brewer: Is
Donny Frank: your spouse evil? Are they trying to hurt you at some points in the relationship?
They might say yes But when they're back when they're work in progress is another they're not trying to hurt me. So what's going on there? Again, back to self oriented, other oriented, it's not only your story, put your story aside. Why do you think your spouse said what they said? I know they shouldn't have said it, it was wrong.
We're going to go back to that and figure it out, but what was the intention behind what they said? Perspective taking will keep you off the canvas. It's when you think, oh, they did it because they're mean and they're nasty and they want to see me in pain. So I think perspective taking is huge. Ownership is incredibly important.
And I'll be able to look at a situation and say, before I tell you what you should be doing differently in an interaction, let me first see what I brought to this. What could I take responsibility for? I have a great story in this book that I came across about West Point. You can see it, it's called No Excuses, Sir.
It's a really good story about ownership. But the idea is that, Don't let a situation, don't let a conflict go by before asking yourself, is it anything, and I'm not saying 50 50, people get stuck on that, even if it's 5%, in relationships, in dynamics, in systems, you shift one thing and you never know how it's going to affect the system.
So let me first ask myself, what did I bring to this? What can I take responsibility for? I would say that's also another important skill and those are skills, once again, going back to our original, the first part of our conversation, those are people who look at, who can look outside of themselves.
They're not entitled. They're not. Entitled people that are always looking to see how the world services them. I want to make the world a better place. And I want to start with my marriage
Gordon Brewer: and
Donny Frank: I empower myself too. I'm not gonna blame anybody. Don't blame me. It's very popular today. But let me, as I'm going to get a couple anywhere through blaming anyway, but at least Right.
What can I be doing differently? How can I say that differently? Maybe I, maybe, maybe my spouse didn't get it cause I didn't say it the way, I didn't say it right. Let me say it again. I'm going to say it differently.
Yeah. Yeah. And I, I think one thing I would add to that is which it kind of described a little bit is learning to take a curious approach with with your With your spouse or with your, with the other person you're in a relationship rather than you know, getting on the defensive all the time.
And so it's just, yeah. Yeah.
Donny Frank: Lead by lead by curiosity, lead by curiosity. That's a hundred percent. Right. I agree with you. I lead with curiosity.
Gordon Brewer: Right. Yeah. I just reminded too, I just think about a question I often ask couples if they're with me and I'll, I'll say to one person, we're going to pretend like you're not here.
So let me talk to your spouse about this. And I'll ask the question, why do you think they do it the way they do it? And so it's just kind of eliciting that, that curiosity, you know, and just, you know, just really kind of Checking in with that. And I think it's, yeah,
Donny Frank: I have, I have a, I'll show you a little demo I use here in my office.
I wasn't planning to do this, but I might as well. So this is one of my favorite items here, this one especially. So I have in my office, I have various, I have other ones here too, but different examples of worlds. And I say, this is a couple. They don't look like they match so much, you know, small, big, hard.
But when you get to know each other, you realize that you're very different. So I said, okay, now this guy, Is in a position to understand what's going on over here on this guy's world. Right? So we say, empty yourself out, put that aside, and we're going to just take a look and see what's going on over here.
Sometimes when someone is in a reactive state, they're going to say things that are really hurtful. They just, they say things are hurtful. And I just want to shut it down. Like I said, get defensive. But you say the word you use was to get curious,
Gordon Brewer: right? Which
Donny Frank: basically means is. What's on the outside, I just don't want in my life.
What's going on inside?
Gordon Brewer: I'm
Donny Frank: curious to know what's behind all this stuff here. This I can't deal with. So we say, you know, and we have our processes by which we try to go inside. And our work we do, we we do dialogue to get inside. But when you go inside the person's reality, what emerges
is a teddy bear.
Gordon Brewer: And
Donny Frank: this you can embrace. You can't embrace the way they're presenting it, but if you get inside and find out the hurt that's going on there, we can embrace this. And the key is to get here. And we don't want to have to express the way that we, if we can find some way to express this and not the way it looked on the outside, we'd be much better off.
And much closer to our goal, but we still have to get to this.
Yeah, that's a, that's a, that's
Donny Frank: a,
Gordon Brewer: yeah, that's a great, great metaphor for folks that maybe don't have a visual yeah, well, it's a, yeah, I forget where a lot of times people are just hearing the audio. He had a like a stuffed toy, but it was a globe.
And then when you opened it up, you turned it inside out. It turned into a teddy bear. So it was, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great. That's great. Okay. Well, Donny again, have to be respectful of your time and tell folks how they can find you and get in touch with you and find out more about your book.
Donny Frank: We're actually doing a book giveaway. So if you would like to see what that's all about you can visit me on our Instagram account, which is Donny on Marriage.
D O N N Y on Marriage
Gordon Brewer: Well, thanks Donny. I enjoyed our conversation and hope to talk to you again here soon.